When I was in college, I did a significant amount of work with social services, specifically working with adult inmates. It was frustrating for me to feel like “the system” was this unfair thing that treated people differently based on class and yet to be learning about that unfairness in “the system”. This poem is about that difficulty that I experienced. It’s about empathizing with the inmates and thinking that the justice system should be overhauled and yet realizing that there were a lot of things I didn’t know about how to solve the problems in the system. It’s about empathizing with the inmates only because I was afraid of what it would be like if that situation were mine.